Daphne Eviatar, lawyer and journalist for the Washington Independent, discusses the Bush Administration’s semantic games that are redefining torture, how John Yoo’s justification of waterboarding conveniently ignored numerous contradictory court precedents, the familiar refrain of fitting legal opinions around the policy, why the Hamdan ruling doesn’t help detainees outside of Guantanamo and how the growing Bagram prison and other “black” detention facilities remain outside the law and hidden from scrutiny.

MP3 here. (33:03)

Daphne Eviatar is a lawyer and freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Legal Affairs, Mother Jones, the Washington Independent and many others. She is a Senior Reporter at The American Lawyer and was an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow in 2005 and a Pew International Journalism fellow in 2002.

Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program, discusses the CIA’s Phoenix program targeting civilians during the Vietnam war, the similarities between the Phoenix program, the Nazis in France in World War II and the “War on Terror,” the vast difference between policy and operational realities, the tragedy of our support for, and murder of Diem, CIA “black propaganda,” the lies that initiate all American wars, the CIA’s criminal involvement in the drug trade, the corruption of the U.S. Congress and pessimism about the ability of the American people to put government power in check.

MP3 here. (40:31)

Douglas Valentine is the author of several books including The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs and The Phoenix Program and a frequent contributor to the biweekly newsletter CounterPunch.